JONATHAN JANSEN | Medical varsity is dying from protests, is in dire need of life-saving surgery

Imagine you are a treated by a doctor or dentist who in every year of his or her studies lost about one-and-a-half to three months of academic training. Stop imagining. If you are served by a graduate of the country’s only specialist university, your life could be in danger. Welcome to Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University (SMU), a once promising institution named after the second president of the ANC.

Here, unfolding before our eyes, is a national tragedy affecting 6,000 students that nobody in politics or education seems to care about. The roots of dysfunction at this campus stretches way back to its origins as the Medical University of SA (Medunsa) in a tumultuous year, 1976. In those days it was not uncommon to chase university leaders off campus, disrupt classes and cause general mayhem as a way of life. Some of my friends and colleagues, distinguished academics, never went back. That culture of chronic instability would become ingrained in the institution in its various forms, whether as the Ga-Rankuwa campus of the University of Limpopo (2005) or since 2015 as a fully-fledged higher education institution.

SMU students deserve the same quality of education as the students of the nearby University of Pretoria or Wits further down the highway.

I asked senior journalists why this ongoing crisis does not enjoy high-level coverage, given its hugely significant consequences for public health. They shrug and promise to investigate. There are two reasons, I suspect, for the media’s inattention. The one is that the disruption and instability have become so commonplace that nobody really cares. SMU has become the Eskom of higher education — eventually you resign yourself to the crisis and try to live with it.

The other reason for public inattention is that it’s a black university. If this were UCT or Wits losing three months of academic time a year, all kinds of public anxieties would be stoked in the press. Middle class and wealthy parents, alumni and donors would demand resolution, threaten to withdraw their offspring, and demand their money back. Senates of universities would huddle out of concern for the academic credibility of the degrees. There would be an urgent plan to end the crisis. No such pressure at a black university that serves children of the working class and the poor.

The issues that trigger protests and disrupt the academic programme are irrelevant, because it can be off-campus accommodation concerns the one day or delayed laptop repairs the next. There is always something that barricades the gates. A recent memorandum of demands contained more than 50 issues. You cannot win. Nor is it always student issues that shut down the campus; sometimes it is a prolonged fight over staff issues such as the demand for a higher salary increment — a fight that cost at least three weeks of academic time this year alone.

As if the combination of staff and student protests was not enough to disrupt the academic timetable, power outages and an unreliable water supply regularly close down this health sciences facility. None of these issues are ever resolved and simply drag the institution from crisis to crisis, with serious academic consequences.

Being a health sciences university, the disruption is not only that of the academic programme but also the training platform provided by the nearby hospital. The ill and infirm travel some distance at personal cost to the hospital, where they expect to be served by health academics and their students — only to find that there is yet another day or week of disrupted services.

It is time for government to act decisively to break the hold of a rogue union and renegade students on one of our most important universities. This cannot be done by the university management alone for they are at the mercy of on-campus gangsters. “Here the unions have more power than the vice-chancellor,” said one manager, and another: “We all know where the power lies but we cannot say it openly.” The unions are the management, controlling agendas they would and should not be in charge of at any self-respecting higher education institution.

Senior government officials say they are aware of the problems at SMU. I suspect there is official exhaustion with trying to solve the riddle of SMU; after all, one of our most competent vice-chancellors was manoeuvred out of that campus through rogue unionists and students. How do you solve a problem like SMU?

You appoint a politically astute administrator (council), with a powerful task team to work alongside the new vice-chancellor to break the stranglehold of rogue elements running and ruining this national asset. That set of appointments must be for at least five years. A new academic culture must be installed and a strict regimen of discipline enforced against rogues in both the union and the student body. The new governance and management structure will require enhanced security because their lives will be at stake. In time, an astute intervention of this sort will create a strong campus culture as far as academics and management are concerned.

Only then can such restrictions be lifted.

Why is this important to do? Because the SMU students deserve the same quality of education as the students of the nearby University of Pretoria or Wits further down the highway. Until that happens, the students of this promising institution will continue to be served a microwaved version of Bantu education on a post-apartheid platter.

It is also these half-baked graduates who will remove your tonsils; or was it your teeth?